Prosecutor says Morgan Mengel was stupid'

WEST CHESTER – Morgan Marie Mengel may have been considered a master manipulator and skilled liar but, investigators say, she was not a good criminal.

During their investigation of the murder of Kevin Mengel Jr., Morgan Mengel’s husband of 13 years and father of her three children, it became clear that she had only a half-baked plan to blame the death on her young lover, Stephen Shappell. When that failed, she crumbled.

“She was stupid,” said Chester County Chef Deputy District Attorney Patrick Carmody, who led the prosecution against Morgan Mengel and laid out the case against her as she pleaded guilty to first-degree murder Tuesday. “I think her perspective was that if she ever got caught she’d blame Shappell for everything. He was her tool.”

But the 37-year-old Morgan Mengel drew attention to herself and Shappell almost immediately after the murder, and was clumsy in faking e-mails and texts she tried to pass off as her husband’s pleas to be left alone.

Mengel failed to realize the texts the two had sent one another about the murder that she thought were deleted were still available to police.

“If we didn’t have the text messages, Shappell was set up to take the fall,” Carmody noted. “Her Achilles Heel is her narcissism. She is so self-absorbed. But, you know, the jails are full of stupid criminals.”

In the months leading up to the murder in June 2010, Morgan Mengel had grown tired of her marriage and wanted her husband to “vanish,” Carmody said, in reciting the facts of the case to Senior Judge Thomas Gavin in support of the guilty plea. She did not want a divorce, believing that Kevin Mengel and his mother, Kathleen Barton, would be granted custody, leaving her without any money.

She made some attempts at finding someone to kill him, but was unsuccessful until she met the 21-year-old Shappell, 15 years her junior, who had come to work at the Mengels’ MKB Landscaping Co. that spring. She began seducing him, and by Memorial Day Weekend had begun an affair.

She fought with her husband on June 15, and two days later put into motion the murder plot with Shappell. He bought liquid nicotine and laced a Snapple drink with it, intending to poison Kevin Mengel at work. She told him to bring along some shovels in case that failed, which it did. Shappell struck Kevin Mengel repeatedly over the head, and he collapsed on the floor of the company’s garage.

Morgan Mengel helped Shappell clean up the garage but the pair had no initial idea of where to dispose the body. Not until June 21, 2010, did Shappell take the body to a wooded area near his former high school, Marple Newtown, to bury it.

Meanwhile, Morgan Mengel was attempting to convince her husband’s mother and friends that he had left her and her children, saying he wanted ‘to be alone.” She sent text messages to them as coming from his cell phone, but used her own style of writing instead of his, drawing suspicion. Even more, she allowed Shappell to move into the couple’s apartment at the Gold Club complex.

When West Goshen Detective David Maurer and Officer Michael Carroll began asking questions, Mengel and Shappell at first tried to deny their affair. But Shappell broke down and admitted it, and later so did Mengel. The investigators’ suspicions were raised that this was not a missing person’s case.

On June 24, 2010, the pair decided to try to leave and go on the run. But instead they met Maurer at the landscaping garage, and Shappell panicked. After hours of questioning and confrontation with the text messages they had exchanged — pulled by West Goshen Detective Darren Sedlak from their cell phone accounts — she confessed.

“It’s extremely cold blooded,” said Carmody.

Morgan Mengel’s final mistake was to attempt to convince Shappell that she had delivered twin sons of his, and that he should tell police that she was blameless in the murder so she could raise them. But police intercepted letters about the “birth” and were able to show Shappell that Morgan Mengel was lying to him.